How To Get A New Team To Work Together Fast

New team collaboration breaks for a reason that looks like something else. You inherited a team, or built one, or a reorg assembled one for you, and on paper it's the kind of group you'd point to in a leadership meeting. Six weeks in, the work is slower than it was when everyone was working alone.

I've told myself the same thing you're telling yourself: they just need time. It's a reasonable read, and it's how most of us were taught teams work. It's also the most expensive assumption a leader can make, because time isn't what fixes this — time is just the slowest way to deliver the two things that actually do.

Every fast-forming team I've worked with had the same advantage, and it wasn't hours. Their people knew who knew what, and they knew how each other operated. Aviation research from the 1980s stumbled into the first half of this by accident, while studying something else entirely. Research on surgical teams named both halves in the title of the paper.

So this is the practical version: why capable teams stall anyway, the two deficits underneath it, and the specific moves that close them in a week instead of six months — the role conversation most leaders think they've already had, the operating manual each person writes for themselves, the shared work that builds more understanding than any dinner will, and the briefing that sets the norms before the first real deadline tests them.

// CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction

1:07 New Teams Don't Have A Time Problem

5:00 The Two Conditions for Click

6:16 Get Uncomfortably Specific About Roles

7:43 Hand Out Your Manual Of Me

9:07 Build Empathy Through The Work

11:30 Run The Pre-Flight Briefing

// NEWSLETTER

Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast

// LEADERSHIP LESSONS

-A new team's problem isn't tenure — it's that nobody yet knows who knows what, or how anyone else operates

-Clarity isn't the org chart, it's decision rights: what each person can decide without asking you

-Most friction diagnosed as a personality conflict is two people who each believed something was theirs

-Empathy on a team isn't friendship — it's knowing enough about how someone works to disagree with them efficiently

-Build the relationship through shared work, then reflect on it; the output isn't the point, watching each other think is

-Launch the team, not just the project — and write the norms down, because a norm that lives only in a conversation is a memory of a meeting

// SPEAKING

Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/

// ABOUT DAVID

One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration.

An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings.

David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately.

//CONNECT

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus

Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus